Acronis Cloud – vCenter Server Integration for backup and restore

Integrating with vCenter Server for backups and restores

Following our previous post “Get started with Acronis Cloud” Backup” we are now ready to backup VMs from our source site and restore them on different location running vSphere infrastructure.

Privileges for VM Backup and Recovery on vCenter Server

These are the privileges a vCenter Server user must have to perform operations on all the vCenter hosts and clusters. A new role was created to later assign the permissions to designated user for Acronis restores.

Installing agent for VMware

We’ll be installing the backup agent for ESX. To download the installer click on add device and select VMware ESXi.

You can also use the same Acronis agent downloaded before and select ‘Agent for VMware’ in ‘what to install’ menu and complete the registration with vCenter Server.
This one can take some minutes. Once completed you are requested to register the device with Acronis, same registration process as before.

Now with VMware agent installed in our Windows machine acting as backend server for Acronis and registered with Acronis cloud console you will see your complete vCenter inventory in Acronis.
This will allow you to run backups, restores and replications of VMware VMs. I will be using this vSphere infrastructure for restores on destination site but will cover available options with a video.

Restoring a backup as VM

Restoring a VM is pretty simple from the GUI with many steps happening on back like every backup restore but will detail the steps for both without going crazy but enough to give an idea of the process.

Important to note we are still using Acronis Cloud storage located in Sydney with name visible on service provider console as fes-au1-baas.acronis.com

Our infrastructure is located in Auckland NZ so I expect a slow restore because my backend server running VMware agent will need to get data from Sydney and inject into the temporary VM using the backend server as NFS datastore.

This is totally not recommended but for this PoC is ok. To address data location Acronis provides to Acronis Storage cluster by downloading the installer in ISO file of a Centos OS that will deploy Acronis storage appliance. This can be installed into a VM or physical box to consume local JBOD, ISCSI or cloud storage.
Check on my other articles on how to deploy Acronis Storage cluster.

So that’s it around storage let’s check the restore process.

Go to backups inventory, select the machine to browse backups and select show backups. Then select desired backup to restore and run as VM option.

After selecting cluster/host, datastore, configuring network adapter and power state click the run now to start the restore.

Preparing the datastore: backend server running VMware agent will be presented to vCenter server as NFS datastore from where the temporary VM will run using the backups files wherever they are located. In my case in Sydney.
Information is added to VM notes and from vCenter inventory the created NFS datastore shows the VM.

Once the temp VM is created using backups files we get the option to finalize the restore and get the VM running on selected datastore during the restore wizard.